Machine learning is the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. In the past decade, machine learning has given us self-driving cars, practical speech recognition, effective web search, and a vastly improved understanding of the human genome. Machine learning is so pervasive today that you probably use it dozens of times a day without knowing it. Many researchers also think it is the best way to make progress towards human-level AI. In this class, you will learn about the most effective machine learning techniques, and gain practice implementing them and getting them to work for yourself. More importantly, you'll learn about not only the theoretical underpinnings of learning, but also gain the practical know-how needed to quickly and powerfully apply these techniques to new problems. Finally, you'll learn about some of Silicon Valley's best practices in innovation as it pertains to machine learning and AI.
This course provides a broad introduction to machine learning, datamining, and statistical pattern recognition. Topics include: (i) Supervised learning (parametric/non-parametric algorithms, support vector machines, kernels, neural networks). (ii) Unsupervised learning (clustering, dimensionality reduction, recommender systems, deep learning). (iii) Best practices in machine learning (bias/variance theory; innovation process in machine learning and AI). The course will also draw from numerous case studies and applications, so that you'll also learn how to apply learning algorithms to building smart robots (perception, control), text understanding (web search, anti-spam), computer vision, medical informatics, audio, database mining, and other areas.

NN

It's a good introduction - not too complicated and covers a wide range of topics. The programming exercises are well put together and significantly help understanding. The free Matlab license is nice.

RS

Aug 13, 2019

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Andrew Ng is a great teacher.\n\nHe inspired me to begin this new chapter in my life. I couldn't have done it without you\n\nand also He made me a better and more thoughtful person.\n\nThank You! Sir.

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Machine Learning System Design

To optimize a machine learning algorithm, you’ll need to first understand where the biggest improvements can be made. In this module, we discuss how to understand the performance of a machine learning system with multiple parts, and also how to deal with skewed data.

Ministrado por

Andrew Ng

Transcrição

In the previous video, I talked about error analysis and the importance of having error metrics, that is of having a single real number evaluation metric for your learning algorithm to tell how well it's doing. In the context of evaluation and of error metrics, there is one important case, where it's particularly tricky to come up with an appropriate error metric, or evaluation metric, for your learning algorithm. That case is the case of what's called skewed classes. Let me tell you what that means. Consider the problem of cancer classification, where we have features of medical patients and we want to decide whether or not they have cancer. So this is like the malignant versus benign tumor classification example that we had earlier. So let's say y equals 1 if the patient has cancer and y equals 0 if they do not. We have trained the progression classifier and let's say we test our classifier on a test set and find that we get 1 percent error. So, we're making 99% correct diagnosis. Seems like a really impressive result, right. We're correct 99% percent of the time. But now, let's say we find out that only 0.5 percent of patients in our training test sets actually have cancer. So only half a percent of the patients that come through our screening process have cancer. In this case, the 1% error no longer looks so impressive. And in particular, here's a piece of code, here's actually a piece of non learning code that takes this input of features x and it ignores it. It just sets y equals 0 and always predicts, you know, nobody has cancer and this algorithm would actually get 0.5 percent error. So this is even better than the 1% error that we were getting just now and this is a non learning algorithm that you know, it is just predicting y equals 0 all the time. So this setting of when the ratio of positive to negative examples is very close to one of two extremes, where, in this case, the number of positive examples is much, much smaller than the number of negative examples because y equals one so rarely, this is what we call the case of skewed classes. We just have a lot more of examples from one class than from the other class. And by just predicting y equals 0 all the time, or maybe our predicting y equals 1 all the time, an algorithm can do pretty well. So the problem with using classification error or classification accuracy as our evaluation metric is the following. Let's say you have one joining algorithm that's getting 99.2% accuracy. So, that's a 0.8% error. Let's say you make a change to your algorithm and you now are getting 99.5% accuracy. That is 0.5% error. So, is this an improvement to the algorithm or not? One of the nice things about having a single real number evaluation metric is this helps us to quickly decide if we just need a good change to the algorithm or not. By going from 99.2% accuracy to 99.5% accuracy. You know, did we just do something useful or did we just replace our code with something that just predicts y equals zero more often? So, if you have very skewed classes it becomes much harder to use just classification accuracy, because you can get very high classification accuracies or very low errors, and it's not always clear if doing so is really improving the quality of your classifier because predicting y equals 0 all the time doesn't seem like a particularly good classifier. But just predicting y equals 0 more often can bring your error down to, you know, maybe as low as 0.5%. When we're faced with such a skewed classes therefore we would want to come up with a different error metric or a different evaluation metric. One such evaluation metric are what's called precision recall. Let me explain what that is. Let's say we are evaluating a classifier on the test set. For the examples in the test set the actual class of that example in the test set is going to be either one or zero, right, if there is a binary classification problem. And what our learning algorithm will do is it will, you know, predict some value for the class and our learning algorithm will predict the value for each example in my test set and the predicted value will also be either one or zero. So let me draw a two by two table as follows, depending on a full of these entries depending on what was the actual class and what was the predicted class. If we have an example where the actual class is one and the predicted class is one then that's called an example that's a true positive, meaning our algorithm predicted that it's positive and in reality the example is positive. If our learning algorithm predicted that something is negative, class zero, and the actual class is also class zero then that's what's called a true negative. We predicted zero and it actually is zero. To find the other two boxes, if our learning algorithm predicts that the class is one but the actual class is zero, then that's called a false positive. So that means our algorithm for the patient is cancelled out in reality if the patient does not. And finally, the last box is a zero, one. That's called a false negative because our algorithm predicted zero, but the actual class was one. And so, we have this little sort of two by two table based on what was the actual class and what was the predicted class. So here's a different way of evaluating the performance of our algorithm. We're going to compute two numbers. The first is called precision - and what that says is, of all the patients where we've predicted that they have cancer, what fraction of them actually have cancer? So let me write this down, the precision of a classifier is the number of true positives divided by the number that we predicted as positive, right? So of all the patients that we went to those patients and we told them, "We think you have cancer." Of all those patients, what fraction of them actually have cancer? So that's called precision. And another way to write this would be true positives and then in the denominator is the number of predicted positives, and so that would be the sum of the, you know, entries in this first row of the table. So it would be true positives divided by true positives. I'm going to abbreviate positive as POS and then plus false positives, again abbreviating positive using POS. So that's called precision, and as you can tell high precision would be good. That means that all the patients that we went to and we said, "You know, we're very sorry. We think you have cancer," high precision means that of that group of patients most of them we had actually made accurate predictions on them and they do have cancer. The second number we're going to compute is called recall, and what recall say is, if all the patients in, let's say, in the test set or the cross-validation set, but if all the patients in the data set that actually have cancer, what fraction of them that we correctly detect as having cancer. So if all the patients have cancer, how many of them did we actually go to them and you know, correctly told them that we think they need treatment. So, writing this down, recall is defined as the number of positives, the number of true positives, meaning the number of people that have cancer and that we correctly predicted have cancer and we take that and divide that by, divide that by the number of actual positives, so this is the right number of actual positives of all the people that do have cancer. What fraction do we directly flag and you know, send the treatment. So, to rewrite this in a different form, the denominator would be the number of actual positives as you know, is the sum of the entries in this first column over here. And so writing things out differently, this is therefore, the number of true positives, divided by the number of true positives plus the number of false negatives. And so once again, having a high recall would be a good thing. So by computing precision and recall this will usually give us a better sense of how well our classifier is doing. And in particular if we have a learning algorithm that predicts y equals zero all the time, if it predicts no one has cancer, then this classifier will have a recall equal to zero, because there won't be any true positives and so that's a quick way for us to recognize that, you know, a classifier that predicts y equals 0 all the time, just isn't a very good classifier. And more generally, even for settings where we have very skewed classes, it's not possible for an algorithm to sort of "cheat" and somehow get a very high precision and a very high recall by doing some simple thing like predicting y equals 0 all the time or predicting y equals 1 all the time. And so we're much more sure that a classifier of a high precision or high recall actually is a good classifier, and this gives us a more useful evaluation metric that is a more direct way to actually understand whether, you know, our algorithm may be doing well. So one final note in the definition of precision and recall, that we would define precision and recall, usually we use the convention that y is equal to 1, in the presence of the more rare class. So if we are trying to detect. rare conditions such as cancer, hopefully that's a rare condition, precision and recall are defined setting y equals 1, rather than y equals 0, to be sort of that the presence of that rare class that we're trying to detect. And by using precision and recall, we find, what happens is that even if we have very skewed classes, it's not possible for an algorithm to you know, "cheat" and predict y equals 1 all the time, or predict y equals 0 all the time, and get high precision and recall. And in particular, if a classifier is getting high precision and high recall, then we are actually confident that the algorithm has to be doing well, even if we have very skewed classes. So for the problem of skewed classes precision recall gives us more direct insight into how the learning algorithm is doing and this is often a much better way to evaluate our learning algorithms, than looking at classification error or classification accuracy, when the classes are very skewed.